Liberators: A Novel of the Coming Global Collapse

31 STEEL SHIPS AND IRON MEN

On July 7, the Kingsway resistance cell received an intelligence report that was marked “SAM Sensitive.” These messages had sources and methods (SAMs) that if revealed could do great harm, for example, endangering the life of a confidential informant.

Their informant’s report gave them details on the upcoming arrival of two French cargo ships operated by La Compagnie Maritime Nantaise (MN). The MN Toucan and MN Colibri were sister ships, with a gross weight of more than nineteen hundred tons each. These were commercial roll-on-roll-off (RO-RO) vessels, specifically designed for transporting vehicles. The ships had loaded at the HAROPA terminal at Le Havre fifteen weeks earlier and had transited the Panama Canal. They were both laden with a mixed cargo of twenty-five-ton véhicule blindé de combat d’infanterie (VBCI) wheeled APCs, fourteen-ton véhicule de l’avant blindé (VAVB or armored vanguard vehicle), and an assortment of military cargo trucks and Renault Sherpa 2 utility vehicles—the French equivalent of the U.S. military Humvee. Based on the recent experience of the resistance in Canada’s eastern provinces, the VBCI “armored vehicle for infantry combat” was considered a key threat.

The two ships were standing in 170 feet of water in the Burke Channel, just a few miles from the port of Bella Coola. This inlet had been glacially carved during the Ice Age. Much like the fjords of Norway, Bella Coola Bay was surprisingly deep. Only the magnitude of its daily tides and its rough outer waters kept it from becoming a more significant seaport.

The ships were not yet anchored; their automatic station-keeping thrusters slaved to their GPS were holding within a few meters of their plotted location. The docking and unloading were scheduled for just after the regular midcoast BC ferry departed the ferry terminal at 9:45 P.M. The unloading was expected to take two full days.

Originally destined for Vancouver, the two ships had been diverted to Bella Coola when threat analysts from the French Directorate of Military Intelligence (Direction du Renseignement Militaire or DRM) decided that Port Metro Vancouver was too vulnerable to a mortar attack by demobilized Canadian Defense Force soldiers. Bella Coola, they reasoned, was a “safe backwater port.”

The royal-blue-and-white-painted ships both had the enormous letters “MN” painted in white on their blue sides, so they were hard to miss. The ships were in good mechanical repair but were heavily streaked with rust.

As the town’s small fishing fleet (now down to just four boats) motored out for the evening, the captain of one of the boats was careful to position his boat at the south side of the flotilla. Inside his boat, four divers were suited up and checking their gear. They crawled onto the boat’s aft working deck, concealed by a stack of crab pots. A quarter mile before the boat came alongside the two French ships, the divers—now wearing dry suits—quickly slipped into the water.

They bobbed at the surface for a few minutes, to adjust the buoyancy of both the rubber bags containing the limpet mines and their own dive vests. At first the bags were too heavy and were dragging them down, but some squirts of air from their regulators into the bags soon brought them to neutral buoyancy. Then their dive vests gave them too much buoyancy, so they had to bleed air to get them back to neutral buoyancy. (This was the same procedure that they had used when adjusting the buoyancy of their camera and gear bags during sport dives.) They hadn’t had the time to do a trial run with the limpet mine bags, and spending this much time on the surface now made them wish that they had.

They swam toward the ships at a depth of ten feet, welcoming the warmth from working their muscles in the chilly water. The leader popped his head above the surface for a moment to catch sight of the ships, then ducked back under and motioned with his arm, showing the others the correct bearing to follow. He held that position while the other three men consulted their wrist compasses and spun their outer bezels to set a rough azimuth for their directional arrows.

Swimming underwater to the ships and attaching the limpets was strenuous, but within the capabilities of the divers. Because they were nervous, they were all sucking air from their tanks faster than they would on a recreational dive. They each carried three limpet mines. All twelve mines already had their timers preset.

As they approached the ships, by prearrangement they diverged into two teams. The visibility was thirty feet, which was above average for the Burke Channel. One member of each team had to surface briefly to reestablish their bearings. Pressing on with only their wrist compasses to guide them, both teams had the enormous bulk of their target ships loom into sight after fifteen minutes of hard swimming. They had been told to attach the limpets at least six feet below the waterline. They opted for fifteen feet to reduce the chance that they might be spotted. The mines were magnetically attached directly over welded seams, at twenty-foot intervals. Each attachment made an audible clunking sound, and this worried the divers. Once the last mine was removed from each bag, they drained all of the remaining air and let them sink down into the depths.

Swimming under the keels of the ships, the two teams set their compasses for due north. They checked their compasses and wristwatches regularly. They were still anxious and going through their air supply quickly.

Two of their air tanks ran low when they were still two hundred yards from shore, so two of the divers had to clip into octopus rigs and share air, swimming side by side. Then they all ran low and one tank ran out completely. Their only option was to begin porpoising, surfacing once every twenty feet to breathe through their snorkels for the final eighty yards of their swim. They all reached the shore within seconds of each other and checked their watches.

There were still eleven minutes until the fireworks. Transitioning to just their cold-water neoprene booties, they rapidly walked uphill toward their planned rendezvous point, a location that was memorized but intentionally left unmarked on their maps.

Thirty seconds before the scheduled detonation they began to quietly but gleefully count down out loud in unison as they walked. At ten seconds before the detonation, they stopped at a clearing in the trees and looked back toward the bay. They sat down side by side and continued counting down, in their quiet chant. Right on schedule, they saw white gouts of foam jumping up the far sides of both ships. A few seconds later, they heard the dull thud of the simultaneous explosions. They sat, enthralled. They cupped their hands over their eyebrows, watching for signs of distress from the ships. Faintly, they heard some sort of klaxon. After two minutes, both ships had perceptibly begun to list on the sides where the limpets had been attached. And after five minutes, the ships were both listing at least forty degrees. Tony—their leader—said dryly, “They’re done. Let’s go.” They resumed their hike, feeling invigorated. One of their local resistance contacts was waiting for them at the rendezvous point.

The four divers were all given the boots and bundles of clothes that had been handed off the day before. Their air tanks, regulators, masks, fins, weight belts, and other gear were buried in a large hole that their contact had dug earlier in the day. As they were refilling the hole, the four men downed Endurox liquid meal supplements—the same drink that they used after Ironman races. They had been saving their last few of these for a physically challenging day like this. Tony raised his in a toast and said, in a fake heavy French accent, “Vive la resistance!” and they all laughed.

They had timed their detonators for 9:45 P.M., just as the ferry was scheduled to depart, so that there would be no doubt that both ships would still be in deep water. The limpets were state of the art, from U.S. Navy UDT war reserve stocks, smuggled into Vancouver nearly a year in advance. The plastic-cased platter-shaped devices weighed seven pounds each and contained four and a half pounds of RDX explosive. (The magnets used for attachment took up most of the rest of their weight.) Their digital timers could be set to detonate up to 999 hours in advance.

When the limpets had first arrived, the logistics cell commander had questioned their potential use before setting them aside for terrestrial sabotage. But quite soon, they realized their intended maritime purpose. The limpet mines were smuggled to Bella Coola on a succession of fishing boat transits.

The team of divers was shuttled up to Bella Coola only forty-eight hours after intelligence of the planned RO-RO ship diversion was received. Their 620-mile drive took just over thirteen hours. The four men and all of their diving gear were crammed into an aging Dodge camper van. Their cover story was that they intended to conduct a series of hydropower dam inspection dives. Otherwise they had no justifiable excuse for the length of their journey or the presence of their dive gear. The only guns that they carried were two revolvers, both hidden behind a panel in the van. Luckily they encountered only one UNPROFOR roadblock, where they were simply waved through.

Their dive was carefully timed to coincide with the outgoing tide on their approach to the ships, twenty minutes of slack tide for their close approach and attaching the mines, and then the incoming tide to hasten their swim to shore.

After the sinking of the two ships, the four-man diving team had to go into hiding and wait two weeks before making their journey home to Vancouver. With dozens of roadblocks set up in the region, they had to make arrangements to get back to Vancouver by sea. This required the cooperation of five fishing boat skippers, who passed them “down the chain” to Campbell River, and finally Vancouver. In the aftermath, a rumor circulated that it was an American SEAL team that had sunk the ships.

After the sinking of the RO-RO ships, the occupation forces viciously clamped down on British Columbia. More checkpoints were established, and raids on suspected resistance safe houses increased. Most of these were the homes of innocent civilians with no connection to the resistance. Brutal acts of reprisal were carried out. Anyone who was a known scuba diver had his home searched, and dozens were arrested, interrogated, and even tortured.

The greatest fear of the resistance was the French helicopters. When paired with passive forward-looking infrared (FLIR) technology, they provided a formidable guerilla-hunting platform.

Whenever helicopters were heard, resistance fighters would quickly head under a tree canopy cover and don homemade equivalents of Raven Aerostar Nemesis suits. The Nemesis overgarments—nicknamed “Turkey Suits”—included a jacket, pants, hood, and face shield, all made with Mylar underneath uneven layers of fabric. The suits mimicked foliage and blocked the transmission of infrared heat signatures. (Emissivity is the value given to materials based on the ratio of heat emitted compared to a blackbody, on a scale from zero to one. A blackbody would have an emissivity of one and a perfect reflector would have a value of zero. Reflectivity is inversely related to emissivity and when added together their total should equal one for an opaque material.) The IR emissivity of Nemesis suits was between .80 and .82, which was close to that of vegetation, whereas human skin had an emissivity of .97, which was just below asphalt at .98.

The fighters who lacked Nemesis suits would cover themselves with heavy-duty olive-green space blankets, supplemented by a top layer of untreated green or brown cotton fabric. (Cotton, as a plant fiber, did a good job of mimicking vegetation.) When constructed, these blankets had all of their edges altered by trimming or by tucking and stitching, so that they did not present any straight lines or ninety-degree corners against the natural background.

Just by themselves, the cotton-covered commercial space blankets—which were silver Mylar on the inside and olive-green plastic on the outside—did a fair job of obscuring IR signatures. Without a distinctive human form, the covered resistance fighters would be invisible for the first twenty minutes. Then, as spots on the space blanket eventually warmed with the transmission of body heat, they would look like indistinct blobs that could not be distinguished from the heat signatures of wild game and range cattle. But if someone wrapped himself tightly in a space blanket, then a FLIR could detect a distinctive human outline in less than an hour. Eventually the NLR fighters learned to position branches to create an air space between their bodies and the blankets, so that the blankets would not be warmed above the ambient air temperature. (FLIRs could distinguish temperature differences as small as one-half of one degree.)

The other trick that they learned was to curl up into the fetal position, so that the distinctive outlines of their arms and legs were not obvious. One two-man sniper team even tried getting on their hands and knees whenever they heard a helicopter, hoping to resemble the heat signatures of bears. The resistance fighters appreciated the fact that there were so many wild game animals and so many cattle in British Columbia, providing a wealth of false targets for the FLIRs.

Bare faces and hands (with high IR emissivity) were a no-no. Gloves and face masks made of untreated cotton in earth-tone colors were de rigueur. (Since camouflage face paint had about the same emissivity as bare skin, it was ineffective in shielding from FLIRs.) The same rule applied for uncovered rifle barrels, plastic buttstocks, and handguards. These were all wrapped in two layers of earthy-tone burlap. Overcoming active IR was much more difficult than overcoming passive IR. Fortunately, few UNPROFOR soldiers used IR pointers or searchlights. Resistance units learned that standard cotton camouflage military uniforms (such as BDUs and Canadian DPMs) did not reflect much IR from an active source, but once they had been washed with modern detergents or starched, they became veritable IR beacons. The detergents with “brighteners” were the worst offenders, since they also gave cloth infrared brightness.

Preoperational IR clothing checks became part of the “inspections and rehearsals” SOP for resistance field units, both day and night. The fighters would first be observed with a starlight scope and given three “right face” commands. This was then repeated with the scope’s IR spotlight turned on, and they would be “painted” up and down by the IR spotlight. Any clothing that failed the IR reflectivity test had to be discarded and put in a designated “decoy” duffel bag.

The overly IR-reflective clothes and hats from the decoy bag were later used to create fake resistance encampments, intended to lure UNPROFOR ground units and aircraft. “Scarecrows” constructed of branches wearing the reflective clothes were either proned out or stood up. Plastic milk jugs (with about the same IR emissivity as human skin) took the place of heads, and rubber examination gloves filled with soil stood in for hands. The scarecrows were topped with boonie hats or pile caps that had been washed in brightening detergent. When seen at a distance from a helicopter, the scarecrows were surprisingly effective, prompting the UNPROFOR helicopter crews to waste many thousands of rounds from their machine guns. They even credited one or more “confirmed kills” in some of these incidents. The ALAT was notorious for failing to follow up with ground action after aerial attacks.

The French made most of their Reconnaissance et Interdiction (REI) flights using their pair of Gazelles. These flights used a crew of three: pilot, copilot, and door gunner. They also could carry two “dismounts.” Typically these would be a FN-MAG machine gunner and a sniper. They preferred to have the Gazelles operate as a pair for maximum effectiveness.

Following the loss of most of their APCs and trucks in the sinking of MN Toucan and MN Colibri, UNPROFOR systematically requisitioned civilian and corporately owned pickup trucks in British Columbia. Using Ministry of Transportation vehicle licensing abstracts, they searched for heavy-duty Ford and GMC pickups that were less than four years old and that were painted green or brown. Composite teams of RCMP officers and French Marines were sent to the registered addresses, carrying seizure paperwork printed in both French and English, and stacks of newly printed Canadian Provisional Government currency. Curiously, owners with French surnames never had their pickups requisitioned. These forays were more successful than their aborted attempts to disarm registered gun owners.

Owners of the pickups were forced at gunpoint to sign “voluntary” title release agreements and to sign receipts for the cash that they were handed. Once the pickups were driven back to the garrisons, they were spray-painted in flat camouflage patterns, and twelve-inch-tall “UN” stencils were applied to the doors, hoods, and tailgates in light blue paint.

The new war of resistance in Canada had some interesting aspects stemming from the U.S. border. In the early stages of the guerrilla war, American citizens were busy with a war of their own. After the corrupt U.S. ProvGov led by Maynard Hutchings and his cronies at Fort Knox, Kentucky, was overthrown, however, attention to the situation in Canada reached prominence. Inevitably, small arms, ammunition, and explosives began to cross the border, starting as a trickle, but eventually becoming a torrent. The Canadian Border Logistics and Training Volunteers (CBLTV) network sprang up and grew rapidly. The group, whose acronym was half-jokingly spoken as “cable TV,” included thousands of U.S. citizens in border states and beyond.

The flow of arms to the resistance in Canada from the CBLTV did not go unnoticed. The Ménard government publicly chastised it as “the fiendish work of the CIA” when in fact nearly all of the materiel was donated and transported by private individuals. LGP soon announced a Land Purchase Plan for all privately held or tribally held land within ten kilometers of the U.S. border. This program was mandatory, and the forced resettlement all took place in a ninety-day span, starting in May. The only exception was incorporated areas, where towns and cities were in close proximity to the border.

This cordon sanitaire, also known as une zone totalement dépeuplée—was a ten-kilometer-wide strip that would be 100 percent depopulated. In this border zone UNPROFOR border guards could fire at will at anyone attempting to cross. The free-fire-zone policy was not publicly acknowledged at first, but warning signs were posted along its length, and eventually parts of it were planted with land mines, which killed deer with alarming regularity.